As priests about th' intoxicating[24] _soma_ Talk as they stand before the well-filled vessel, So stand ye round about this day once yearly, On which, O frogs, the time of rain approaches. (Like) priests who _soma_ have, they raise their voices, And pray the prayer that once a year is uttered; (Like) heated priests who sweat at sacrifices, They all come out, concealed of them is no one. The sacred order of the (year) twelve-membered, These heroes guard, and never do neglect it; When every year, the rainy season coming, The burning heat receiveth its dismission.[25] In one hymn no less than four gods are especially invoked for rain--Agni, Brihaspati, Indra, and Parjanya. The two first are sacrificially potent; Brihaspati, especially, gives to the priest the song that has power to bring rain; he comes either 'as Mitra-Varuna or P[=u]shan,' and 'lets Parjanya rain'; while in the same breath Indra is exhorted to send a flood of rain,--rains which are here kept back by the gods,[26]--and Agni is immediately afterwards asked to perform the same favor, apparently as an analogue to the streams of oblation which the priest pours on the fire. Of these gods, the pluvius is Parjanya: Parjanya loud extol in song, The fructifying son of heaven; May he provide us pasturage! He who the fruitful seed of plants, Of cows and mares and women forms, He is the god Parjanya. For him the melted butter pour In (Agni's) mouth,--a honeyed sweet,-- And may he constant food bestow![27] This god is the rain-cloud personified,[28] but he is scarcely to be distinguished, in other places, from Indra; although the latter, as the greater, newer god, is represented rather as causing the rain to flow, while Parjanya pours it down. Like Varuna, Parjanya also upsets a water-barrel, and wets the earth. He is identical with the Slavic Perkuna. For natural expression, vividness, energy, and beauty, the following hymn is unsurpassed. As a god unjustly driven out of the pantheon, it is, perhaps, only just that he should be exhibited, in contrast to the tone of the sacrificial hymnlet above, in his true light. Occasionally he is paired with Wind; and in the curious tendency of the poets to dualize their divinities, the two become a compound, _Parjanyav[=a]t[=a]_ ("Parjanya and V[=a]ta"). There is, also, vii. 101, one mystic hymn to Parjanya. The following, v. 83, breathes quite a different spirit:[29] Greet him, the mighty one, with these laudations, Parjanya praise, and call him humbly hither; With roar and rattle pours the bull his waters, And lays his seed in all the plants, a foetus.